My name is Jon Gillham I am a 33 year old, husband, father of 3 (all aged 4 and under), engineer and huge geek when it to comes to systematizing and outsourcing any business. With over 10 years in the online publisher/advertising space I try to provide my thoughts with the hope it helps people build their own business! More About Me

Last week I introduced a new strategy I am using to combine powerful expired domains, epic posts and a silo structure on a website to systematically build my six figure challenge authority site.

This strategy has not resulted in explosive growth but what it has done is provided a very systematic way to build out my authority site which has already started making money $150 in Feb.

This post will get into the exact details of how I go about setting up these building blocks.

The strategy is a combination of…

Buying POWERFUL Expired Domains

Creating an Epic/Niche Dominating Post

301 redirecting the domain to a relevant Silo Structure on Your Authority Site

There are three basic steps for completing this strategy…

The appeal of this strategy for me is the systematic way I can repeat this strategy in different niches on the same site.

There is no reason that a site can’t continuously be growing one building block at a time.

Growing My Six Figure Challenge Site 1 Building Block at a Time!

How Risky Is This?

Nothing is without risk but I believe this strategy is low risk for the following reasons…

This already naturally occurs online when one business is purchased by another business. Often when say 1 consulting firm purchases another consulting firm it will 301 redirect the old business domain to a new page on the acquiring businesses site.

If done correctly the user will be better off. The visitor to the old URL will end up on an authoritative post providing information they will find useful which is better than the alternative of ending up at a dead site.

Risk can be mitigated by being able to see how Google views the domain before 301 redirecting to the authority site. If Google responds negatively to the site the strategy fails but the authority site is not put at risk. If Google responds positively with traffic and ranking then we can move forward with rolling the expired domain into the authority site and see increased traffic!

Risk can be mitigated by only performing this move with PREMIUM domains with ONLY REAL backlinks. For this strategy more than most uses of expired domains I believe it is important to only use sites that were “real” and have “real” backlinks.

301 Building Block Strategy Step by Step…

Below is the procedure for how to go about getting executing the 301 building block strategy…

There are a lot of ways to find and buy powerful expired domains. None are easy or cheap.

1.1 Identify Domains

My Ultimate Expired Domain Guide is still very much relevant and the basis of the strategy my team uses for identifying opportunities to purchase domains!

However to find the kind of premium domains I want to use for the 301 building block I have had to use a newer method which works well for me because of the size of my team.

If you are looking to purchase domains yourself than Domain Auctions or Domain Brokers would be the best way to go but again this will be expensive.

What Domain Metrics Do I Look For

Good Domain

Great Domain

Amazing Domain

Page Authority

25+

40+

50+

Domain Authority

15+

30+

40+

Trust Flow

15+

25+

30+

Citation Flow

15+

25+

30+

Page Rank

0+

3+

5+

Alexa Rank

None

10,000,000 or higher

Under 10,000,000

If highly relevant, clean and can be purchased at an inexpensive price I will execute this strategy with that domain.

Ideally I am looking for “Great Domains” but again these are expensive. The successful examples in this post were both just under Great Domains.

Finding an amazing domain that is relevant is almost impossible so I can’t build a system around rare events but if one comes along I would get it(if the price was within reason).

My Secret Weapon – Large Team & Massive Back ordering

The secret weapon I have for buying these high quality domains at lower than market value is because my team is out scouring the internet for expired domains. In the process they identify dead sites about to drop.

A by-product of all this searching using the scraping method I talk about in the ultimate expired domain guide is that I find a lot of broken sites that have not yet expired.

By having a detailed list of all these sites and then rolling over 10-40 backorders each week I put myself into a situation where I can pick up a handful of very powerful domains for cheap.

UPDATE – Each week this process generates a surplus of premium domains I can buy at below market value…to get access to this list Sign Up Here (free first month)

How You Can Find Great Domains – Auctions

Other than purchasing from a broker the easiest way to buy premium domains is to purchase them at auction but this can be very expensive!

How to find relevant expired domains with page rank and backlinks at the Auction Sites…

This video will show how to easily identify domains at the multiple auction sites that would be most helpful to your SEO efforts.

2.4 Finish Website

In this step the job is to do a quick check to make sure the site is all setup correctly. Nothing fancy but the project manager just needs to do a QC check to make sure there are no glaring mistakes.

Here is a decent example (not my site) of a relevant site built on an authoritative expired domain that is now getting relevant traffic – http://thelittlehouse.ca/

3.1 Review at 30 & 60 Days

Part 3 is where the power of this strategy comes in with reviews at the 30 day mark and 60 day mark you will quickly be able to see how Google is viewing the site and make a go / no-go decision on combining it with the authority site.

The best way to make sure these checks happen for me to is to have the project manager enter a calendar event in Gmail for us to review the site at the 30 and 60 day mark.

Here are the three things to check for…

1. Traffic Quantity and Source

I am looking to see quick sustained organic traffic growth with a lot of traffic coming from the keywords we are going after.

The site below is one of the sites my team built and has quickly gotten over 200 visitors per day with the majority coming from organic search.

2. Google Ranking

Based on the check above this seems odd but a simple test I like to do to see how Google is viewing a site is to copy a title for an article word for word and put it into Google.

If it is a longer title 5+ words I would like to see the site ranking on the first page.

How Google ranks the site for the longer article titles is a great indication of how Google views the site overall.

3. Articles Indexed

This could really be the first check but if for any reason after 30 days the sites posts are not being indexed it is an indication that there could have been a penalty applied to the site at some point in the past and therefore should be avoided for the 301 building block strategy.

Check by going to Google and entering – “site:url” to see if it has been indexed.

Go-No Go Decision

Based on the review at the 30 and 60 day mark we need to make a decision if it is a good candidate to progress to the next steps of the 301 building block strategy.

Not all sites will be good candidates and I have had some that initially looked very promising but then fizzled out.

My Six Figure Challenge Authority Site Examples:

So far for my authority site project I have done 2 301 Building Blocks…

One – Former Industry Website

Two – Former Site of University Program

3.2 Epic Post

Now that the decision has been made to make the move it is time to get an EPIC post created that will be worthy of ranking in the top spot in Google for the target keywords.

There are different strategies/thoughts on what EPIC means but to me it means…

This epic/niche dominating post acts as the “pillar” article or main silo and will ultimately link to all other posts in the silo that will be created as part of this strategy.

3.3 Map the Move & Create Additional Posts

Pulling off this strategy can be a little complicated but here are a few ways I really like to simplify it…

All posts associated with this “building block” should be grouped into their own category

The epic post and all sub posts including those moved from the initial build on the old URL will fall into this one category

Taking a complete inventory of all former pages is key. There are 2 sources to identify old pages/posts to make sure get included in the 301 redirects.

MajesticSEO (find all URLs on the site that have links to them)

Archive (find all posts on the site that have been captured in archive.org – simply click around the site and find all possible posts – a sitemap page can be very helpful if one has been captured by archive)

Using the example site (again not my site) you can find all the pages that should be redirected by following majesticSEO and Archive.

To keep track of this research use tab 2 in the Google document I shared earlier and here –

Have an article created which closely matches the topic of the original post and 301 redirected to that new similar post

In addition to identifying the old posts from the site it is important to map out another group of posts all of which will fall under the silo structure of this building block. (Great Silo Structure Overview)

3.4 301 Redirect Posts and Add Additional Posts

In this step it is time to publish posts at the authority site and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new EPIC Niche Dominating post and the other relevant posts in that category.

There are a few ways to do this redirection but the plugin I prefer is Redirection (free).

With the step above done executing the 301 redirects in an organized way is not hard.

Make sure to track 404 errors at the expired domain and be sure to go in 2 weeks after doing the 301 redirect to clean up any 404 errors.

IMPORTANT TIP – One of the benefits of this strategy is that this niche dominating post will now be very powerful in terms of helping other posts rank so it is critical that the post links to all posts in that category.

I am a 33 year old husband, father of 3, engineer and a huge fan of developing systems to build useful and profitable websites. The reason I build online businesses is to provide financial independence for my family and yours AND so I can spend time outside skiing and biking with my family.